Google tracks hellish wildfire season in the American West

But not every fire is a crisis, experts say.

Google has created the 2012 US Wildfire Crisis Map to dynamically track the four dozen wildfires blazing across the United States, mostly in the West.

The map, built on its Crisis Response platform, is tracking about 50 fires, including the 100,000-acre Clay complex in Utah and the dangerous Waldo Canyon fire that is threatening the city of Colorado Springs. The map tracks the fires themselves, including their extent, information on suppression efforts, evacuation status, and the locations of shelters.

The interface allows users to "turn on and off the layers of information" using a checkbox in the right-side panel. A "Share" button up top allows you to capture the URL or the embed code. A KML (keyhole markup language) file of the Waldo fire allows you to view that most dangerous of fires in great detail in Google Earth.

On the LatLong Blog, Pete Giencke of Google's Crisis Response Team encourages users to provide the team with data requests, to enrich the mapping possibilities during the fire season.

Turning data into usable information in a crisis

Giencke, a GIS data engineer, told Ars that the main crux of his efforts is working with partners to ensure that their (often GIS-specific) data is more usable and discoverable by those in a crisis situation.

"Our partners produce great datasets, sometimes in a way a lay audience has limited access to–in a crisis situation we can’t expect them to be downloading third-party programs or learning new data formats. So our charge on the tools side is to make the visualization of the data intuitive for a non-GIS user, make the interface easy to use, and enable the ready sharing of the data, e.g. with friends and family, via their social network of choice."

To do that, Crisis Response uses a number of tools that are designed to render huge amounts of data quickly and graphically. They use open source and publicly available tools as much as possible, including an App Engine backend to host the data, JavaScript, and CSS. They use Google JS Test to test.

The front end is created using Closure, an open-sourced Google tool that provides a framework for JavaScript and handles compilation, leaving a very small JS footprint, scriptwise.

For the crisis map application, they again use open source and publicly available tools, including a Google App Engine back-end to host the application, and JavaScript (Closure, Google Maps API V3) and CSS on the front-end. For mobile use, the Closure tools, like the compiler, help reduce the footprint of the application and improve cross-browser/device compatibility.

"GIS nerds like me get really excited about the kinds of data out there we can use," he said. But that data is not often user-friendly, so for the wildfire map, and other crisis projects, the data is treated via OGC open standard, enabling complex data sets to be read efficiently.

"Some of the data sets we get can be one to two gigabytes," he explained. "But by using, say, Mercator map tiles, we can produce 256-by-256 pixel renderings (i.e. tiles) of the data, and overlay those tiles atop the map where appropriate. By slicing up the data, users can efficiently, quickly zoom in and move around, where otherwise you'd quickly bog down."

Crisis data is the least abstract data imaginable. It is data that saves lives and homes and communities. So making sure it is quickly and clearly accessible is paramount. Evacuation routes out of a fire situation or a flood or hurricane can be hundreds of megabytes. But the Crisis Group uses Fusion tables and can get them to render out at 200 megabytes on a mobile phone.

"We’re targeting people affected by a disaster, often these folks have only their smartphones and tablets as a vehicle to finding relevant crisis-related information," said Giencke, so it's helpful to do "anything we can do to scale our ability to serve data to them more efficiently."

A brief history of crisis tech

Humans have been mapping crises since there have been maps and crises. But modern crisis mapping really came into its own with the development in Kenya of the Ushahidi crowdsourced platform. Originally created by Erik Hersman, Ory Okolloh (now Google's policy manager for Africa), Juliana Rotich, David Kobia, and others, it was first employed during the election violence in Kenya in 2008. It has since been used in dozens of places, from the Haiti earthquake to the tsunami in Japan.

Google's Crisis Response group, however, reaches beyond mapping. Its first undertaking was in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf, where the company created overlays of storm information.

In the wake of the earthquake in Haiti, Google built Person Finder, to allow 'individuals to post and search for the status of relatives or friends affected by a disaster." Searchers could update information on missing persons to the Finder. During the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, they provided a MODIS satellite viewer of the spill's spread using images from NASA.

Regarding the 2012 US Wildfire Crisis Map, however, not everyone is a fan. Although maps such as Google's are more accessible, wildfire professionals see them as problematic, not so much for what they do or do not include in terms of data, but in their implied message.

"The new corporate maps tend not to be interested in helping educate the public about fire’s natural role in the ecosystem," Prof. Mike Medler told Ars. Medler is the chair of the Environmental Studies program at Western Washington University's Huxley College of the Environment and an expert in mapping wildfires. "Instead we see an explosion of 'disaster maps' and 'crisis maps,' often mapping dozens of fires that are no more a 'disaster' or a 'crisis' than a flood occurring on a wild river in the back country, or a particularly cold winter killing elk in a wilderness area."

Features

The Crisis Response platform allows Google to respond to a crisis by, among other things:

Creating a resource page with emergency information and tools.

Launching Google Person Finder to connect people with friends and loved ones.

Hosting a Crisis Map with authoritative and crowd-sourced geographic information.

Curt Hopkins / Curt writes for Ars Technica about the intersection of culture and technology, including the democratization of information, spaceships, robots, the theatre, archaeology, achives and free speech.